The WHO on Tuesday announced a mass polio immunization campaign in 15 African countries targeting a total of 72 million children, Agence France-Presse reports. “Polio has spread again in recent years with cases imported from some of the four endemic nations in Asia and Africa, mainly Nigeria, in a setback to global attempts to eradicate the crippling and sometimes lethal disease,” the news service writes (10/26).

Nearly three months after major floods hit large portions of Pakistan, at least seven million people are still without shelter, Stacey Winston, a U.N. spokesperson, said at a news conference in Islamabad on Tuesday, Agence France-Presse reports.

The bivalent oral polio vaccine (bOPV) was found to induce a “significantly higher immune response” than the existing trivalent oral polio vaccine (tOPV), according to a study published on Tuesday in the journal Lancet, Reuters reports (Kelland, 10/26).

Reuters examines the global effort to eradicate polio and how failure to eliminate the disease could affect future global health undertakings. “Global health and vaccines experts say they have polio ‘on the ropes,’ but are frustrated that the goal of eradicating it continues to elude them more than 20 years after they set their sights on it. They fear failure could crush trust in other major disease projects such as fighting malaria, HIV or measles,” according to the news service.

Newspaper Examines Gene That Enables Drug Resistance In Bacteria The Washington Post looks at the gene NDM-1, which makes bacteria “resistant to many medications [and] marks a worrying development in the fight against infectious diseases, which can mutate to defeat humans’ antibiotic arsenal.” The article examines the presumed origin of…

An accountability report, prepared by officials in G8 member countries’ foreign affairs departments, acknowledges that G8 “countries are $10 billion behind the five-year, $50-billion commitment they made at their 2005 summit in Scotland,” the Canadian Press/CTV News reports (6/20).

Health leaders from around the world gathered on Friday to formally launch a new strategy for eradicating polio, Newsweek’s “The Human Condition” blog reports in a post examining the challenges and successes health advocates face in attempting to wipe the virus out completely (Carmichael, 6/18).

Guardian Selects Winning Stories On International Development Wining submissions to the Guardian’s International Development Journalism Competition were published online Monday. The annual contest features stories about “issues facing the developing world [that] are often overlooked or underrepresented by the media,” according to the newspaper. Professional and amateur journalists wrote about…

“A large polio outbreak in Tajikistan â€“ Europe’s first in years â€“ has the potential to further spread the dangerous virus to other regions of the world, the [editors of] the Canadian Medical Association Journal [CMAJ] warned Wednesday” in an editorial appearing in the journal, the Canadian Press reports.